Given a recent conversation with Cheryl I'm chasing the wrong issue; the lack of a device name in /e/n/i (and very intermittent in my case) isn't the immediate issue to fix. It's the lack of a DNS nameserver (and dns-search) entry in /etc/resolv.conf that is the breakage that needs fixing immediately. Looking through the patch I see a switch to static IP address allocation which should explain why we no longer get DNS entries.
Given a recent conversation with Cheryl I'm chasing the wrong issue; the lack of a device name in /e/n/i (and very intermittent in my case) isn't the immediate issue to fix. It's the lack of a DNS nameserver (and dns-search) entry in /etc/resolv.conf that is the breakage that needs fixing immediately. Looking through the patch I see a switch to static IP address allocation which should explain why we no longer get DNS entries.